Operation Gladio is likely to be
a controversial book and may even be contested by several quarters.
However, it would be difficult to reject the evidence author Paul L.
Williams has provided.

Paul L. Williams is a journalist and
author of,

The Vatican Exposed

Crescent Moon Rising

The Day of Islam

Osama's revenge

The Al-Qaeda Connection

He has written articles for,

The Wall
Street Journal

USA Toda

The
Counter-Terrorist

NewsMax

National Review

He is the winner of three first-place
Keystone Press Awards for journalism. He has also served as a
consultant for the FBI and as an adjunct professor of Humanities at
the University of Scranton and Wilkes University.

***

The story started as early as 1942 with the formation of
the Vatican Bank. The same year ONI
(Office of Naval Intelligence) recruited Lucky Luciano, a
pre-eminent drug lord.

The Swiss director of the US Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) Allen Dulles came to the conclusion,

"We're fighting the wrong enemy."

Schutzstaffel (SS) sent Dulles a
message through the Vatican that the Nazi government wanted to
establish a separate peace with the United States; they wanted to
fight the Soviets.

Dulles met Prince Max von Hohenlohe
in Bern. Hohenlohe found Dulles in agreement with him. Later, Dulles
also met other Nazi officials to forge the new alliance. Chief of
Special Intelligence for the OSS in China Col. Paul E. Helliwell
thought of another unholy alliance between the US intelligence
community and organized crime groups.

Consequently, the US intelligence
agencies got drug lord Lucky Luciano released from jail, allowed him
to build his narcotic empire, and simply watched the flow of drugs
into the largely black ghettos of New York and Washington.

The unholy alliance of the American
spies and criminals was replicated everywhere, from Laos and Burma
to Marseilles and Panama.

After Richard Nixon became president in 1969, the strategy of
tension gained more impetus. National Adviser Henry Kissinger issued orders
to Licio Gelli to carry out terror attacks and coup attempts.

The United States and the Vatican
channeled millions of dollars for these operations. Most of the
money was raised in questionable ways.

The first major attack in Europe took
place on December 12, 1969 when
a bomb went off in the lobby of
Banca Nazionale Dell' Agricoltura in Milan, Italy. Seventeen people
died in the explosion. Within an hour, three bombs exploded in Rome.

According to official figures, 14,591
acts of violence with a political motivation took place between
January 1, 1969 and December 31, 1987.

In these terror attacks, 491 people died
and 1,181 were injured. A large number of terror attacks took place
in other European countries from 1965 to 1981. After a series of
assassination attempts to kill French President De Gaulle
failed, he denounced "the
secret warfare of the Pentagon" and expelled the European
headquarters of NATO.

The label was applied very liberally by
the US intelligence agencies that,

"any government risked being so
labeled if it advocated nationalization of private industry
(particularly foreign-owned corporations), radical land reform,
autarkic trade policies, acceptance of soviet aid, or an
anti-American foreign policy."

The CIA and the Vatican started
Operation Condor in the early 1970s when Opus Dei elicited support
from Chilean bishops for the overthrow of the government of
President Allende.

The Catholic group was closely working
with the CIA-funded organizations such as the Fatherland and Liberty, which
was later turned into the dreaded Chilean secret police.

"In 1971, the CIA began shelling out
millions to the Chilean Institute for General Studies (IGS),
an Opus Dei think tank, for the planning of the revolution."

Many members of the IGS joined the
government after the coup.

Hernan Cubillos became the
foreign minister. He was the founder of Que Pasa, an OPUS Dei magazine,
and publisher of
El Mercurio, the largest newspaper
in Santiago which was subsidized by the CIA.

Williams shows that the Vatican was fully involved in
Operation Condor. The Pope was fully behind the purging of the
left wing clerics; leaders of the military junta were devout
Catholics.

The Vatican did not abandon General
Pinochet even when he was arrested in Britain for the murder of
thousands of Chileans.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal
Angelo Sodano wrote to the British government on behalf of
the Pope to demand his release.

Under Pinochet, hundreds of thousands
Chileans had disappeared while more than four thousands had died.
More than fifty thousand Chileans were tortured in the name of
Catholic god.

CIA's dirty war was perpetuated in many
Latin American countries with the help and blessing of the Vatican.

"Between 1996 and 2002, we, the
United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every major
terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen)
against Russia.

Between 1996 and 20002, we, the
United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every
single uprising and terror related scheme in Xinjiang (aka East
Turkistan and Uyhurstan).

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the
United States, planned and carried out at least two
assassination schemes against pro-Russian officials in
Azerbaijan."

Operation Gladio is a highly
well-researched book with some 1,100 endnotes and footnotes. This
work is highly rich in details. It is an estimable scholarly and
intellectual accomplishment which is unrivaled.

His scholarly work fills a major lacuna
in the study of the US foreign policy which was left by scholars
such as,